July 28, 2018Earth, Environment Scientists Predict Mass Extinction Could Be Triggered By 2100 by Ben Renner BOSTON — Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) predict that by 2100, the earth’s oceans will contain so much carbon that a sixth mass extinction will begin. “This is not saying that disaster occurs the next day,” explains Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, about his recent study in a media release. “It’s saying that, if left unchecked, the carbon cycle would move into a realm which would be no longer stable,...

Discussing cities is like talking about the knots in a net: they’re crucial, but they’re only one part of the larger story of the net and what it’s supposed to do. It makes little sense to talk about knots in isolation when it’s the net that matters. The 100 million city: is 21st century urbanisation out of control? Cities are part of the system we’ve invented to keep people alive on Earth. People tend to like cities, and have been congregating in them ever since the invention of agriculture, 10,000 or so years ago. That’s why we call it civilisation....

“This French secularism, which sometimes surprises our neighbours, is a powerful cement in a country torn by so many wars of religion." - Emmanuel Macron President Emmanuel Macron has hinted at controversial changes in France’s bioethics law this year at the same time as he invited the country’s religious leaders to participate fully in the public debate about reforms the Catholic Church opposes. Addressing senior clergy at a New Year’s reception, the president said his role was to ensure both that France debated the bioethics reforms seriously and that it adapted its laws responsibly to changes in technology and society....

France on Wednesday kicked off a marathon round of talks designed to inform the country’s legislation on bioethics, with the government hoping to avoid a repeat of the poisonous debate that hijacked the legalisation of same-sex marriage. The six-month consultation, involving scientists, medical practitioners and legal experts from across France, will lead to a revised bioethics law, slated for later this year. It will touch on a broad range of subjects, from legalizing euthanasia to the development of artificial intelligence. Some of the topics up for discussion represent a political minefield in France, and President Emmanuel Macron will be keen...

Scientists believe a massive object that could change our understanding of history is hidden beneath the Antarctic ice. The huge and mysterious “anomaly” is thought to be lurking beneath the frozen wastes of an area called Wilkes Land. The area is 151 miles across and has a minimum depth of about 2,700 feet. Some researchers believe it is the remains of a truly massive asteroid more than twice the size of the Chicxulub space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs. If this explanation is true, it could mean this killer asteroid caused the Permian-Triassic extinction event, which killed 96 percent...

A Yazidi cemetery has been vandalized in the southeastern city of ĹžanlÄ±urfa in Turkey, the Turkish news site Gazete KarÄ±nca reported.Â The graves in the Yazidi cemetery of Zewra village were damaged by Â“unknown individualsÂ” on the night of the referendum on the Turkish constitution, April 16.Â The Yazidi Cultural Foundation condemned the attacks in a written statement, saying in part: Â“Just as ISIS [Islamic State] attacks graves and shrines and exhibits its inhumane character, those who attacked our dead also revealed their own mentality.Â”Yazidis, or Yezidis, are a Kurdish-speaking ethno-religious community indigenous to northern Mesopotamia. Their ancient faith, Yazidism, has a...

In reaction to President Trump's roll-back of a number of President Obama's environmental protection and climate change regulations, Leftist documentary-maker Michael Moore lost it... "Trump has signed orders killing all of Obama's climate change regulations. The EPA is prohibited henceforth from focusing on climate change." But he was not done... as he sees the most dire outcome from this terrifying regulatory roll-back... "Historians in the near future will mark today, March 28, 2017, as the day the extinction of human life on earth began, thanks 2 Donald Trump" So to be clear, global humanity is destined for extinction because America...

March 2, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) -- Population controllers told the Vatican at a conference this week that the Catholic teaching of “responsible parenthood” in determining family size has “result[ed] in collective failure” in reducing the world’s population. They suggested that the only way to stop the exhaustion of “humanity’s natural capital” is by imposing a system of “taxes and regulations” that would help modify “social norms of behaviour.” This week’s Vatican symposium on Biological Extinction, sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences was a closed-door event. Speaking at the event were two controversial figures,...

Artificial human life could soon be grown from scratch in the lab, after scientists successfully created a mammal embryo using only stem cells. Cambridge University mixed two kinds of mouse stem cells and placed them on a 3D scaffold. After four days of growth in a tank of chemicals designed to mimic conditions inside the womb, the cells formed the structure of a living mouse embryo. The breakthrough has been described as a ‘masterpiece’ in bioengineering, which could eventually allow scientists to grow artificial human embryos in the lab without the need for a sperm or an egg.

“Rich western countries are now siphoning up the planet’s resources and destroying its ecosystems at an unprecedented rate,” said biologist Paul Ehrlich, of Stanford University in California. “We want to build highways across the Serengeti to get more rare earth minerals for our cellphones. We grab all the fish from the sea, wreck the coral reefs and put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We have triggered a major extinction event. The question is: how do we stop it?”

This population decline of Greeks in Turkey has not been due to natural causes but rather the result of state-sponsored attacks and pressure. The current Greek population in Turkey is estimated at fewer than 2,000.Â But this population decline was not due to natural causes; the Greek community has become nearly extinct due to many state-sponsored attacks and pressure.The largest attacks took place during the last years of the Ottoman Empire with pogroms and discrimination continuing until the present day.In 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) announced that Â“the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between...

Scientists say they can now describe in detail how the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs produced its huge crater. The reconstruction of the event 66 million years ago was made possible by drilling into the remnant bowl and analysing its rocks. These show how the space impactor made the hard surface of the planet slosh back and forth like a fluid. At one stage, a mountain higher than Everest was thrown up before collapsing back into a smaller range of peaks. "And this all happens on the scale of minutes, which is quite amazing," Prof Joanna Morgan from Imperial...

Professor Stephen Hawking says humans have less than 1,000 years on Earth before we are wiped out by extinction. The celebrated physicist said humans will only survive if another planet was found to live on. The 74-year-old said unless this happens then humans will be wiped out in a mass extinction.

The age of the dinosaurs ended 66 million years ago, when an asteroid six miles in diameter crashed into what is now southeastern Mexico. The world went up in flames. Dinosaurs, along with the massive reptiles that ruled the sea and the sky, perished as forest fires raged across the globe, dust blotted out the sun, and Earth experienced intense heat, frigid cooling, and then more heat. Conventional wisdom states that mammalian diversity emerged from the ashes of the mass extinction, ultimately giving rise to our own humble species. But according to a study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology,...

“A typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash,” says a new report.Nuclear war. Climate change. Pandemics that kill tens of millions. These are the most viable threats to globally organized civilization. They’re the stuff of nightmares and blockbusters—but unlike sea monsters or zombie viruses, they’re real, part of the calculus that political leaders consider everyday. And according to a new report from the U.K.-based Global Challenges Foundation, they’re much more likely than we might think. In its annual report on “global catastrophic risk,” the nonprofit debuted a...

Dinosaurs were already in an evolutionary decline tens of millions of years before the meteorite impact that finally finished them off, new research has found. The findings provide a revolution in the understanding of dinosaur evolution. Palaeontologists previously thought that dinosaurs were flourishing right up until they were wiped out by a massive meteorite impact 66 million years ago. By using a sophisticated statistical analysis in conjunction with information from the fossil record, researchers at the Universities of Reading, UK and Bristol, UK showed that dinosaur species were going extinct at a faster pace than new ones were emerging from...

More than 65 million years ago, a six-mile wide asteroid smashed into Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, triggering earthquakes, tsunamis and an explosion of debris that blanketed the Earth in layers of dust and sediment. Now analysis of commercial oil drilling data—denied to the academic community until recently—offers the first detailed look at how the Chicxulub impact reshaped the Gulf of Mexico. Figuring out what happened after these types of impacts gives researchers a better idea of how they redistribute geological material around the world. It also gives scientists an idea of what to expect if another such impact were to occur...

This month, a drilling platform will rise in the Gulf of Mexico, but it won’t be aiming for oil. Scientists will try to sink a diamond-tipped bit into the heart of Chicxulub crater—the buried remnant of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, along with most other life on the planet. They hope that the retrieved rock cores will contain clues to how life came back in the wake of the cataclysm, and whether the crater itself could have been a home for novel microbial life. And by drilling into a circular ridge inside the...

Writing in the journal Nature the week of Dec. 16, Yale's Pincelli Hull and colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution argue that modern extinction rates may be a poor measure of whether we're in the midst of a mass extinction event today -- something many scientists suspect may be happening. Instead, Hull and her co-authors contend, the best way to see a mass extinction in real time is by studying changes in species and ecosystems.